Handle your ideas (memos, annotations and links)

Memos

You can use memos to tell the story of your project—from
your early ideas and assumptions to fully-fledged insights about a topic,
person, or event. Use them to 'talk to yourself' as you make sense of
your data.

Tracking your analytical process with memos can help you
to increase the transparency and reliability of your findings. With your
process recorded in memos, you can easily demonstrate the evolution of
a theory or quickly call up data that supports client questions.

Memos are quite 'free form' in NVivo and here are some
ideas for how to use them:

Project
memo—record your goals, assumptions and key decisions. Like
a journal, update it regularly and include links to the significant
theme nodes and sources.

Interview
or participant memo—summarize the key points of an interview.
Make note of contradictions, surprises or early hunches. Include ideas
about the nodes you might make and include photos or descriptive information
about the interview setting.

Node
memo—explain why you think a theme is significant (especially
useful in team projects). Add to the memo as your thinking evolves
and include links to the related literature. By writing as you go,
you won't face the pressure of staring at a blank document when it
comes to writing up your project.

Query results memo—what do these query
results tell me? Make a memo to organize your ideas and to plan future
steps. If you display your query results in a visualization, copy
and paste it into the memo.

Analytical
and procedural memos—record your findings in analytical memos
and use procedural memos to document the methodological steps you
take.

NVivo
memo—record what works best in the software, including any
tips or shortcuts you want to remember. Include links to NVivo related
support materials that you've found on the web.

Annotations

As you explore and code your source material, you
may want to annotate the content. While memos might be better for capturing
your reflective thoughts about a topic, annotations are useful for making
notes about a particular phrase or marking content for follow-up. You
could use annotations to:

Make a note about the
body language or voice intonation at a particular point in a conversation.